An Empirical Study On The Application Of Task Repetition In English Writing Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

In task-based language teaching,the variables of task implementation have always been the primary concern of scholars,among which task repetition is one such factor that has attracted much attention from scholars at home and abroad in recent years.The previous research has mainly focused on the effects of task repetition on learners' oral production,but relatively few studies have been done on learners' written production and little attention has been paid to research on different types of task repetition.Hence,the present study attempts to explore the effects of two different types of task repetition on junior middle school learners' written production and investigate the learners' perceptions towards task repetition.Based on the task-based language teaching,output hypothesis,and trade-off hypothesis,the current study mainly addresses three questions:1)What are the effects of identical task repetition and procedural task repetition on junior middle school students' English writing fluency?2)What are the effects of identical task repetition and procedural task repetition on junior middle school students' English writing accuracy?3)How do English learners perceive two different types of writing task repetition?In this study,92 Grade One students of two intact classes wererecruited at random from a junior middle school in Hunan province as the research subjects,who then were divided into one control group and two experimental groups.In the six-week experiment,they were all required to finish a pretest and a post-test and students in the experimental groups participated in repetition tasks as well as a questionnaire survey.After data collecting,all the data were processed by working out corresponding fluency and accuracy indicators,and then analyzed by SPSS.The major findings are stated as follows:1)In terms of writing fluency,the two repetition groups showed a significant progress in the two fluency indicators in the post-test compared to the pretest.Thus,identical task repetition and procedural task repetition were both beneficial to improving junior middle school learners' fluency of written production.Besides,no significant difference were found between the effects of the two types of task repetition.2)With regard to writing accuracy,the identical task repetition group improved significantly,which had a positive impact on second language learners' accuracy of writing.As for the procedural task repetition group,only one accuracy indicator showed improvement.Thus,in terms of improving learners' writing accuracy,identical task repetition was better than procedural task repetition.3)Although different opinions towards the two kinds of task repetition existed,the research subjects had a positive perception towardstask repetition on the aspects of task difficulty,frustration,and satisfaction in improving their performance of writing.The present study enriches the research and theory of task repetition and also provides useful implications for English writing instruction.However,due to some practical limitations such as the relatively short research time span,this study only partially reveals the effects of task repetition on learners' written language production.